The Alternatives: Designers Subverting Fashion’s Status Quo

As high fashion becomes an increasingly commercial business, a group of rebellious young designers has emerged, challenging the unwritten codes of design, from gender stereotypes to what’s even considered clothing.

MATTHEW ADAMS DOLAN

Fashion is always searching, frequently fruitlessly, for the new. Or at least, what it perceives to be new. Which actually means that which is different from what was recently considered fashion, and that which is about to go out of style. Think of punk, borne of the tattered raiments of glam and the retro stylings of Ossie Clark and Yves Saint Laurent, or “the age of nostalgia for our own little lives,” as Vivienne Westwood described it. Rather than cherish the past, Westwood chose to destroy it. More recently, a new breed of designers borne of the ’90s minimalism of Donna Karan, Michael Kors and Calvin Klein have selected decoration and elaboration as their leitmotif: the pinprick embroideries of Joseph Altuzarra; the furs and ruffles of Jason Wu. A softer form of destruction, but still a sweeping away of the past.

And now, the backlash. Only a year ago, there was an almost complete absence of the avant-garde on the international fashion scene, dominated as it was — and, frankly, still is — by the turf wars and seesawing profit margins of luxury conglomerates, with designers now pushed to churn out a minimum of four collections a year. The rise of the “pre-collection” — the commercially led midseason ranges that generally constitute 70 percent of a designer’s business, given increasing visibility via flashy runway shows — only emphasizes the importance of the bottom line. The result of this is clothing that is salable, safe, even staid. Yet over the past 12 months, an alternative has emerged, fully formed as if from a chrysalis.

VETEMENTS

These new fashion designers are instantly recognizable as rebels. Their very names are strange and unfamiliar: Vetements, Alyx, Vejas. They’re a disparate bunch, strewn across multiple continents, united by an approach to fashion at odds with contemporary tropes of luxury: a visual language of distress and decay. Usually their garments aren’t attractive; nor are they trying to be, in the traditional sense, with raw edges, frayed seams, pieces turned inside out or cut to twist oddly on the body. Those bodies can be male or female: In them, the demarcation between the sexes erodes, stranding onlookers in a hinterland of indeterminate gender identity. A key trait is a play on scale, disturbing the eye by blowing things up big: jackets with sleeves that trail to the knee, sweaters that do double-duty as dresses. Or the converse: sweaters shrunken painfully small, trousers molded like a second skin, T-shirts riding up to reveal the midriff. There are hints of the ’70s and of the ’90s, the latter possibly more disconcerting for observers who remember the first time around, the work of Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester or Miguel Adrover, who once created a coat from Quentin Crisp’s mattress ticking.

Many of these fledgling designers are too young to have witnessed their predecessors firsthand. They see their aesthetic as something singular. So even in their referencing of a past, of punk and deconstruction, their reiterations emerge looking new. Or at least different. And their difference from what the rest of fashion is doing — a cookie-cutter polish, a focus on luxurious materials and mass branding, on money-spinning accessories — is the reason for their resonance. In relation to the rest of contemporary fashion, they’re the Alternatives.

ALYX

The aforementioned Vetements is a Paris-based cooperative of disenfranchised youths. It’s helmed by the Georgian designer Demna Gvasalia, alongside two others who, until recently, worked in established houses. In March, they staged their second show around 10 p.m. in a gay sex club in Paris’s Marais district that apparently pours amyl nitrate into its air conditioning to give guests an additional buzz. The clothes were a mess, which was the point: scissored open, sewn back together to distort prints and warp dimensions, haphazardly layered. Oversize suits and coats drowned skinny male and female models alike, all of whom were dour and whey-faced. So far, so edgy. But within months the label reached the final heat of a prize established by Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy to award a young designer with about $325,000 and a business mentorship. Now the line is available through roughly 80 stockists worldwide.

Vetements is the most visible of these new Alternatives. Its name translates, literally, as “clothes.” Which is what all of these designers make, obviously. Representative of a collective shift, if not a consciously self-identified group, they’re also bound by the idea of anonymity. That doesn’t mean designers are intentionally unidentified, as was the case with the godfather of the Alternatives, Martin Margiela, who attached blank labels to his clothes and refused to be photographed for much of his entire 20-year career. The aim was to dispel the myth of the designer and focus on the clothes. But today, when branding is as paramount to any fashion business as the actual clothes, to disregard a line’s marketability is a statement of its own.

Even when these lines are eponymously labeled, it’s almost as if the names have been chosen for their indistinguishability. There’s a utilitarian bent to a moniker like Claire Barrow, a young British designer who hand-draws and paints odd, plaintive, almost childlike figures across her clothes. It’s difficult to imagine her surname, British English for “hand cart,” writ large across the rear of a pair of jeans. Her contemporary Alex Mullins, whose men’s wear focuses on decoration with flaws and whose clothes almost vibrate with a sense of the human hand, is another name that would be tough to picture embossed into a handbag like Louis Vuitton’s.

ALEX MULLINS

Ironically, this notion of anonymity has helped many of these labels gain relative success. There’s a hunger among the instantly recognizable to sport that which is inversely obscure. Rihanna tasks her team with scouring graduate shows for garments before they hit the market, such as the exaggerated tailoring of Matthew Dolan, a Sydney-bred designer fresh out of Parsons School of Design. Matthew Williams, the designer behind Alyx, is a former creative director to Lady Gaga and Kanye West. Those connections have already enabled him to negotiate his clothing into coveted fashion shoots, although he just unveiled his first collection of cropped, buckled jackets and pants with functional zippers that flit from oversize to skinnily undersize. West is also a high-profile proponent of Vetements. He attended the label’s recent show during Paris fashion week; the day after, both he and his wife, Kim Kardashian, were seen wearing the label’s signature reworked hooded sweatshirts with distended sleeves. (His version featured the word “Vetements,” inscribed in a Metallica font, for good measure.)

On the one hand, this could be seen as a sinister manifestation of a sort of sartorial Svengali complex, the idea that a celebrity can singlehandedly make a designer. Which is, alas, true. It may also be an indication of superstar megalomania, of a boldface name insisting they not be outshone, even by a designer name (except, of course, for a price, and an advertising campaign). Nevertheless, the search for anonymity or, maybe more accurately, non-ubiquity, unites these brands. There are demands to wearing these kinds of clothes, clothes that don’t shout their antecedents and don’t bear designer names. A few, like Vejas, freely transgress gender boundaries, presenting traditionally female garments like bandeau bras on men, and swamping women in man-size jackets. Others are simply bought and worn by both sexes, regardless of the department they hang in. It’s a new way of buying fashion, which is actually very old: It focuses on the garment itself, not the name inside.

A phrase often used by the press and buyers in an attempt to pigeonhole these looks into a conventional fashion vocabulary is “street wear.” Which is odd, because aren’t all clothes designed with the ultimate intent of being worn on the street? Perhaps not. But with these designers, it denotes a sense of pragmatism that’s embedded in the garments. There are repeated reiterations of classic garments — biker jackets, for instance. They come oversize at Martine Rose and Vetements, undersize and sliced apart at Alyx, scribbled with faux naïf (or maybe genuine) drawings by Claire Barrow. The MA1 flight jacket in dark nylon with hazmat orange lining pops up frequently, its scale toyed with, sometimes ripped apart and pieced back together. But these clothes aren’t that different from ones hanging in most people’s wardrobes: Nothing has three arms, or anything too obscure. Barrow, for a time, scrawled her drawings on preexisting leather jackets. You could argue that would define her as a decorator rather than a designer. However, she doesn’t seem overly worried about attaching prescriptive labels to what she does, to defining that line between decoration and design, or indeed recycling versus invention. Likewise these other Alternatives. They make us see something new in garments we already know, rather than designing something totally new. The alienness of their familiarity is arresting.

MARTINE ROSE

Barrow is 25 with gappy teeth and straggly hair that’s generally dyed a variety of shades, sometimes simultaneously. The models she uses often bear a striking resemblance to her. Nothing about her look is conventional. The same could be said for the models at Vejas Kruszewski’s debut presentation in New York earlier this year. Many of them were transgender; only one was recognizable (Hari Nef, the transgender model-actress who recently signed with IMG). The Vejas models and clothing expressed a strange, new type of beauty: The clothes, in leather and shearling, bind the wearers, conjuring dual connotations of protection and imprisonment, some opening with zippers like wounds.

A quote on Kruszewski’s website reads, “I have never been remotely interested in looking like or being in any way a real girl.” It’s a statement that seems to apply to women, men and those who identify as neither who wear his clothing. Kruszewski met his stylist, Marcus Cuffie, via Tumblr. He retails his clothing through his own website. He has an Instagram account and a Facebook page. There’s a sense that all the email addresses offered probably lead directly to the designer, under different guises. It seems like a rudimentary setup but it’s how many of these brands do business. It also suggests how these operations are hand-to-mouth. Until last year, Barrow’s London studio was the size of a shed. Last time I visited her she was alone, diligently scribbling her doodles onto fabric. Vetements began business in Gvasalia’s apartment; they could only afford to move to a studio last fall. Fabrics are humble; garments, too. Nylon and denim abound, because they are cheap, easy to source and can be used in a multitude of ways. Dolan, for instance, focuses almost entirely on denim, shredding and interlacing the stuff to form fabrics that look like a combination between bedraggled fur and a rag mop. Other pieces in his collection are made from Kmart T-shirts, bought in bulk, butchered and woven back together into sloppy oversize shapes haphazardly layered.

VEJAS

These clothes certainly wouldn’t be defined as luxury items at first glance, and yet there is an alternative luxury in their workmanship or handcraft. That somehow feels more noteworthy, more honest, than pricey materials like crocodile and mink sewn into straightforward T-shirts and sweaters. “The most luxurious thing is time,” says Gvasalia. Time to hand-paint, take apart, use complicated weaving techniques, all of which distinguishes these clothes, in lieu of traditionally luxurious materials. In a sense, that workmanship allies many of these street labels with haute couture.

These designers aren’t revolutionaries, at least not in design. However, collectively, they represent something new and different in fashion. Gvasalia, for one, emphasizes that, despite appearances to the contrary, Vetements isn’t intended to be anti-fashion. None of these labels are. Nor are they anti-luxury. They’re just different. They represent an alternative to the homogeneity and, indeed, the hegemony of fashion today. They are another road, less traveled; a new path along that perpetual search for the new.